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Everyone's favourite BookWorld heroine, Thursday Next, is back.

Fourteen years after her last adventure, Thursday Next, literary detective, finds herself in an unusual situation her job policing the fictional characters of the BookWorld has been downgraded since her previous escapades are now themselves in print.

However, a pressing threat may call her back into action: first Sherlock Holmes and then Miss Marple are found dead, stopping their series in their tracks. When Thursdays written self also receives a death threat, it becomes clear that a serial killer is on the loose.

Meanwhile, the Goliath Corporation plan on taking literary tourists on holiday in the novels of Jane Austen. Thursday alone realizes the true intent of Goliaths unwanted incursions into fiction, but she cant fight all these battles on her own. She must team up with the one person she cant really get along with: the written Thursday Next.

About the Author

Jasper Fforde traded a varied career in the film industry for staring out of the window and chewing the end of a pencil. He lives and works in Wales and has a passion for aviation.

Thursday Next returns in another postmodern literary detective fantasy from Fforde (The Big Over Easy, 2005, etc.).Once again, the author creates a world in which only permeable boundaries separate truth from fiction, the living from the dead (or extinct: Thursday knits a sweater for her pet dodo, Pickwick). Our heroine revisits places and people from earlier Fforde novels, as well as from an immoderate number of English and American classics - one memorable page contains allusions to The Woman in White, Robert Ludlum, Jason Bourne, Our Mutual Friend, Bleak House and The Mayor of Casterbridge. Although the Special Operations Network has nominally been shut down, in reality Thursday works undercover with Acme Carpets and on the side runs an underground cheese market, featuring such tempting morsels as Mynachlog-ddu Old Contemptible, "kept in a glass jar because it will eat through cardboard or steel." Thursday embarks on a dizzying set of adventures through fictive territory. Untoward things have been happening in the literary world. For example, the natural comedy in Thomas Hardy novels has mysteriously been removed - Jude the Obscure originally began as one of the most "rip-roaringly funny novels in the English Language" - and Thursday travels through space and time to rectify this situation. Her contemporaries are not as interested in reading as they are in watching reality TV shows like England's Funniest Chainsaw Mishaps or Samaritan Kidney Swap. Meanwhile, Thursday has to deal with Friday, her teenaged lump of a son, whose main goals in life are sleeping and forming a band called The Gobshites. While Fforde's humor can be affecting, it can also grate with its self-consciousness, as the author nudges readers to admire his verbal dexterity. Vertiginous cleverness here proves to be almost too much of a good thing. (Kirkus Reviews)

Jasper began his career in the film industry, and for nineteen years held a variety of posts on such movies as Goldeneye, The Mask of Zorro and Entrapment. Secretly harbouring a desire to tell his own stories rather than help other people tell their's, Jasper started writing in 1990, and spent ten years secretly writing novel after novel as he strove to find a style of his own that was a no-mans-land somewhere between the warring factions of Literary and Absurd.

After receiving 76 rejection letters from publishers, Jasper's first novel The Eyre Affair was taken on by Hodder & Stoughton and published in July 2001. Set in 1985 in a world that is similar to our own, but with a few crucial - and bizarre - differences (Wales is a socialist republic, the Crimean War is still ongoing and the most popular pets are home-cloned dodos), The Eyre Affair introduces literary detective named 'Thursday Next'. Thursday's job includes spotting forgeries of Shakespeare's lost plays, mending holes in narrative plotlines, and rescuing characters who have been kidnapped from literary masterpieces.

Luckily for Jasper, the novel garnered dozens of effusive reviews, and received high praise from the press, from booksellers and readers throughout the UK. In the US The Eyre Affair was also an instant hit, entering the New York Times Bestseller List in its first week of publication.

Since then, Jasper has added another four to the Thursday Next series and has also begun a second series that he calls 'Nursery Crime', featuring Jack Spratt of The Nursery Crime Division. In the first book, 'The Big Over Easy', Humpty Dumpty is the victim in a whodunnit, and in the second, 'The Fourth Bear', the Three Bear's connection to Goldilocks disapperance can finally be revealed.

In January 2010 Jasper will be revealing a new book, called 'Shades of Grey', in which a fragmented society struggle to survive in a colour-obsessed post-apocalyptic landscape. Don't worry, it's not that serious.